Shotgun Shack lays out the blogging rules for first-time volunteers in foreign countries:
Your blog is where show all your friends that you are bad ass and you ride around the capital city sometimes in tuk tuks or matatus or chapas or tap taps or on the backs of motorcycles or in the beds of pick up trucks. It’s where you display your fake prowess at carrying water (or something else) on your head like the locals and the pictures of yourself standing next to war junk. Blogging for the folks back home allows you to vent about the cultural difference while at the same time being magnanimously accepting of them.
Casey Michel, a Peace Corps volunteer who just started a two-year stint in Kazakhstan, maintains an entertaining blog about his new cultural digs. Here he shares his thoughts "On A Near-Naked Guy Whipping Me With Plants":
Through living in the bubbles of Portland and Rice, my body had become a carefully-crafted china doll. It was not built for such extreme. I was not ready for such punishment. I wanted nothing more than to slip out the way I’d come, back to the safety and promise of room temperature.
At that point, one of the TurKazakhs stood up, turned, and babbled something to me. I saw him reach over and grab a fistful of parsley-like greens, previously afloat in a small tub to my right. I looked to Muybin to translate. “You lie down,” he said, still grinning through the heat. My eyebrows drooped, and Muybin pointed to the empty bench next to me. There lay a soaked towel, flat on the step. Something in the back of my memory cobbled the words “banya” and “whip,” but any method of hesitation I carried had liquefied long ago. I maneuvered to the towel and lay down on my stomach. A few seconds later, there was a 6’2” Kazakh, a man I’d just met a few seconds earlier, standing in little more than his skivvies and smacking my back up and down with soaked greens. Were my lungs not on fire, I would have laughed.
Thirty seconds later the man instructed me to roll over. The steam continued to seep. I could barely open my eyes. He proceeded to slap my chest with the leaves, but I could only take a few seconds of this ritual green-cleansing before I had to call it a night. Struggling to sit up, I waved him off, trying to convey my thanks as I wobbled down the steps and through the door. The air greeted me like a chilled robe, and I sucked it in as quickly as I could.
(Photo of Peace Corp training by Flickr user Adam Coster)
The Dish 